Easy Writers

Guilty pleasures without guilt.

Orwell had a weakness for escapist fiction, for “good bad books.”Credit Illustration by John Cuneo

When Matthew Arnold keeled over, in April, 1888, while hurrying to catch the Liverpool tram, Walt Whitman managed to contain his grief. “He will not be missed,” Whitman told a friend. Arnold reaffirmed all that was “rich, hefted, lousy, reeking with delicacy, refinement, elegance, prettiness, propriety, criticism, analysis.” He was, in short, “one of the dudes of literature.” Whitman probably figured that his own gnarly hirsuteness would save him from becoming a dude. He was wrong, and therein lies a lesson for all hardworking scribblers: stick around long enough, develop a cult following, gain the approval of one or two literary dudes (in Whitman’s case: Henry James, Ezra Pound, and F. O. Matthiessen), and you, too, can become respectable.

Of course, it’s one thing for a poet who contains multitudes to become a literary dude; it’s another for writers who deal with lawmen, criminals, private detectives, spies, aliens, ghosts, fallen heroines, and killer cars. Such writers—commercial and genre novelists—aim at delivering less rarefied pleasures. And part of the pleasure we derive from them is the knowledge that we could be reading something better, something that, in the words of Arnold, reflects “the best that has been thought and said in this world.”

For the longest time, there was little ambiguity between literary fiction and genre fiction: one was good for you, one simply tasted good. You could either go to an amusement park or trundle off to a museum, ride a roller coaster or stroll among the Flemish Masters. Genre writers were not exactly unmindful of this. In 1901, G. K. Chesterton, the creator of the plump, priestly sleuth Father Brown, lamented, “Many people do not realize that there is such a thing as a good detective story; it is to them like speaking of a good devil.”

But good devils make for good company, and, in time, bookish people did begin to speak of them. In 1929, the eminent Milton scholar Marjorie Nicolson, the first female president of Phi Beta Kappa, described a dinner party rescued from the brink of dullness when the desperate hostess asked a distinguished scholar to name “the most significant book of recent years.” The great man replied, “I never can make up my mind between ‘The Bellamy Trial’ and ‘The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.’ ” That, you can imagine, got the room buzzing.

Nicolson’s point was not that Agatha Christie is better than George Eliot but that readers who seek out mystery novels are looking to escape not from life but from literature, from the “pluperfect tenses of the psychical novel.” Nicolson was speaking on behalf of those intellectuals who, “weary unto death of introspective and psychological literature,” simply yearned for a good story. Edmund Wilson, however, didn’t buy it. He was irritated by the giddy approval of highbrows like Nicolson, and, in 1944, published an article in this magazine that contained some disparaging remarks about the mystery genre. To Wilson’s surprise, he received more passionate letters than his criticisms of the Soviet Union ever elicited—so many, in fact, that he felt compelled to revisit the case a few months later.

The result was “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?,” which dispatched the genre’s big guns with seignorial aplomb: Dorothy Sayers’s “The Nine Tailors” was “one of the dullest books I have ever encountered in any field”; Margery Allingham’s “Flowers for the Judge” was “completely unreadable.” Reading mysteries, Wilson concluded, “is a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking.” He admitted that John Dickson Carr had a descriptive gift and that Raymond Chandler wrote well, though he remained “a long way below Graham Greene.” Chandler wasn’t pleased. “Literature is bunk,” he retorted, propagated by “fancy boys, clever-clever darlings, stream-of-consciousness ladies and gents, and editorial novelists”—in other words, a bunch of literary dudes.

Nonetheless, it was a senior literary dude, W. H. Auden, who pointed Chandler canonward. In “The Guilty Vicarage,” his sin-soaked defense of the detective story, Auden decided that Chandler’s “powerful but extremely depressing books should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art.” Although properly gratified by Auden’s estimation, Chandler protested that he didn’t know what to make of it. He had studied the classics at the Dulwich College preparatory school, in London, and regarded himself as “just a fellow who jacked up a few pulp novelettes into book form.”

For all that, it was Chandler’s blend of stylish wit and tough-guy sentimentality that made it easier for the commercial writers who followed. If you were good—maybe not Chandler good, but good enough—you could find a booster among the literati. In 1965, Kingsley Amis compiled his “James Bond Dossier,” and six years later Eudora Welty gushed over Ross Macdonald’s “Underground Man” on the front page of the Times Book Review. In 1989, fans of Robert B. Parker’s Spenser books were treated to a laudatory piece in the Book Review by the esteemed critic and biographer R. W. B. Lewis, and, more recently, the Times ran a feature on Lee Child. Indeed, scores of novelists in a variety of genres—P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, John le Carré, Donald Westlake, Charles McCarry, Henning Mankell, Dennis Lehane—routinely receive glowing writeups in major newspapers and literary venues.

The doyen of thriller writers, however, continues to be the Detroit-based novelist Elmore Leonard. Leonard began publishing in the nineteen-fifties and since then has produced at least one novel every two years. Hollywood discovered him before the book critics did (“3:10 to Yuma,” “Hombre,” and “Valdez Is Coming” were all adapted for the screen), but in short order Leonard’s cut-to-the-chase dialogue, intelligently spare narrative, tight-lipped heroes, and offbeat villains had reviewers tripping over their own superlatives. In 1995, Martin Amis dubbed him “a literary genius who writes re-readable thrillers,” and who “possesses gifts—of ear and eye, of timing and phrasing—that even the most indolent and snobbish masters of the mainstream must vigorously covet.” It seems we have reached a point when Robert Graves’s words about Shakespeare can be applied to Leonard: the remarkable thing about him is that he is “really very good, in spite of all the people who say he is very good.” Does this sound like a guilty pleasure?

Praise can be seductive, and writers who ordinarily would not reach for literary laurels may start hankering after them. But if a writer of a romance or a mystery succeeds in deepening her narrative does the guilt disengage from the pleasure, and is the pleasure any the less for it? Writers like P. D. James pride themselves on rejecting the very conventions of detective fiction that appealed to Marjorie Nicolson. In 1981, James enlisted the Times Literary Supplement to make her case: “The modern detective story has moved away from the earlier crudities and simplicities. Crime writers are as concerned as are other novelists with psychological truth and the moral ambiguities of human action.” James’s point is well taken, but for many genre practitioners there is a danger in earnestness. Nothing bogs down a pulpy tale faster than real-life feelings about real life. The weakest parts of Robert Parker’s violent but often charming Spenser novels are the soul-searching conversations between the detective and his shrink girlfriend Susan Silverman. The dialogue makes your head explode, and not in a good way.

Skilled genre writers know that a certain level of artificiality must prevail, lest the reasons we turn to their books evaporate. It’s plot we want and plenty of it. Heroes should go up against villains (sympathetic or hateful); love should, if possible, win out; and a satisfying sense of closure and comeuppance should top off the experience. Basically, a guilty pleasure is a fix in the form of a story, a narrative cocktail that helps us temporarily forget the narratives of our own humdrum lives. And, for not a few readers, there’s the additional kick of feeling that they’re getting away with something. Instead of milking the cows or reading the Meno, they’re dallying somewhere with “Fifty Shades of Grey.”

So, despite the best efforts of literary theorists, the concept of guilty pleasures, although wobbly, seems to be holding firm. NPR currently airs a “My Guilty Pleasure” segment, where “writers talk about the books they love but are embarrassed to be seen reading,” and where the novelist Gary Shteyngart turned up one day to riff on the post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel “Zardoz.” Although he admitted that he couldn’t quote a single sentence from Jane Austen, he managed to rattle off lines from “Zardoz,” such as “Stay close to me, inside my aura.”

Probably a few well-respected writers can recite passages from genre novels, and some may recognize the following:

I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other. I may credit the seductive influence of an old vintage upon the narrator for the beginning of it, and my own skeptical incredulity during the days that followed for the balance of the strange tale. . . .

I do not say the story is true, for I did not witness the happenings which it portrays, but the fact that in the telling of it to you I have taken fictitious names for the principal characters quite sufficiently evidences the sincerity of my own belief that it MAY be true.

It’s a pretty good story, too, about an infant raised by gorillas: a big guy, six feet three, two hundred and forty pounds, knows how to handle a knife—maybe you’ve heard of him? He was created in 1912 and appeared in twenty-five sequels, twelve or thirteen of which I read when I was around twelve or thirteen. Had I been any older, I think I would have known that this is writing as a form of silent-film acting, no more believable than the conspiratorial smiles and exaggerated frowns of hammy vaudevillians. The passage I’ve cited is the opening of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s “Tarzan of the Apes,” whose centennial is being commemorated by the Library of America’s publication, this year, of the original pulp novel.

The All-Story, the magazine in which Burroughs’s novel first appeared, was called a pulp not because it was citrusy but because it was printed on cheap, untrimmed wood paper. But, if you wanted juicy, that’s where you headed, because that’s where many genre writers earned their bona fides. Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, David Goodis, H. P. Lovecraft, and Philip K. Dick wrote for the pulps, and all, not coincidentally, have been ordained by the Library of America. One hardly requires more proof of the insidious plot: writers we once thought of as guilty pleasures are being granted literary status. The man whom Rudyard Kipling (hey, didn’t he also write about some kid in the jungle?) accused of having published a book so that he could “find out how bad a book he could write and get away with it” is now a literary dude. Despite the turgid prose, the wooden dialogue, and the fact that the apes exhibit more complexity than the humans, the Tarzan novels have become a solemn cultural fixation. “Tarzan of the Apes” is both “prelapsarian fantasy in its conceit and Emersonian fable in its reach,” Gerald Early confidently asserts in “A New Literary History of America.” Not only that, but the “Tarzan story of man in a state of nature leads to a kingdom no less powerful than that of Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost.’ ” Evidently, one man’s Cheetah is another man’s Satan.

The guilty-pleasure label peels off more easily if we recall that the novel itself was once something of a guilty pleasure. In the mid-eighteenth century, there was a hovering suspicion that novels were for people not really serious about literature. Instead of laboring over “An Essay on Man” or some musty verse drama, readers could turn the pages of an amusing French novel or even one by Richardson or Fielding. Unlike works of moral or religious instruction, novels were diverting. Of course, if they proved too diverting, how good could they be? Hence Dickens, with his enormous audience, was considered by many of his contemporaries to be more of a sentimentalist and a caricaturist than a serious artist.

Modernism, of course, confirmed the idea of the commercial novel as a guilty pleasure by making the literary novel tough sledding. Far from delivering easy pleasures, modernist fiction could be an exercise in aesthetic and psychological subtlety; it was written not for people with time on their hands but for those willing to put in the time to master it. Indeed, fiction in the age of modernism became as much identified with literature as poetry or plays, and its complexities required a new class of expert readers, a secular clergy capable of explaining its mysteries. Serious fiction was serious business, and a reader might tire of it.

George Orwell was such a reader. His essay “Good Bad Books,” which takes its title from a coinage by Chesterton, is his apologia for admiring “the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished.” Orwell had two kinds of good bad books in mind: the first consisted of “escape” literature,” having nothing to do “with real life”; the second, although concerned with real life, was “quite impossible to call ‘good’ by any strictly literary standard” and proved “that intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a story-teller, as it would be to a music-hall comedian.” Orwell admits to enjoying Sherlock Holmes, Raffles, and “Dracula,” but can’t take them seriously. He seems positively heartened by the thought that such books remind us “that art is not the same thing as cerebration,” that, in effect, intelligence could be a hindrance to writing fiction; otherwise, every intelligent critic would be capable of writing a readable novel.

Today, the literary climate has changed: the canon has been impeached, formerly neglected writers have been saluted, and the presumed superiority of one type of book over another no longer passes unquestioned. So when Terrence Rafferty, in the Times Book Review last year, expressed disappointment with a novel that tried and failed to transcend the limitations of its genre he caught some flak.

For Rafferty, the book demonstrated the difficulty of finding “an expressive equilibrium between ‘literary’ fiction and genre fiction.” Literary fiction, he went on to say, “allows itself to dawdle, to linger on stray beauties even at the risk of losing its way.” That was enough to rankle Ursula K. Le Guin: “The distinction Mr. Rafferty makes between literary and genre fiction, though cherished by many critics and teachers, was never very useful and is by now worse than useless.” The presumed dichotomy also irks Lee Child, the author of a popular series of books featuring the ex-military policeman Jack Reacher. Child is indignant that thrillers might be considered peripheral to literature. “The thriller concept is why humans invented storytelling, thousands of years ago,” he told an interviewer. “It’s the only real genre, and all the other stuff has grown on the side of it like barnacles.” And—who knows?—Trollope might have ceded him the point. A writer who can deal with murder, barbarity, and horror—with “tragic elements”—is, Trollope argued, “a greater artist and reaches a higher aim than the writer whose efforts never carry him above the mild walks of everyday life.”

But, as is often the case with efforts to recognize and raise up the formerly downtrodden, a spirit of revision can lead to overvaluation. Yes, there’s something to be said for John D. MacDonald’s 1960 noirish thriller “The End of the Night,” but one has to wonder at the lavish generosity that led Stephen King to proclaim it among “the greatest American novels of the twentieth century,” one that “ranks with ‘An American Tragedy.’ ”

King doesn’t want to be a guilty pleasure. Having mastered the horror genre, he started contributing, in the nineteen-nineties, to small prestige journals like Antaeus, and in 1996 he received an O. Henry Award for a story published in this magazine. In 2003, the National Book Foundation awarded him its medal for distinguished contribution to American letters. At that point, King had published forty books, including the well-received “On Writing,” but not everyone was convinced. Harold Bloom fumed that King was a writer of “what used to be called penny dreadfuls.” The fact that the National Book Foundation judges “could believe that there is any literary value there or any aesthetic accomplishment or signs of an inventive human intelligence is simply a testimony to their own idiocy.” In short, Bloom was annoyed that King had become a dude of literature.

Although dudehood seems to be conferred nowadays for durability as much as for merit, comparisons needn’t be invidious. Consider two novels—one literary, the other a mystery—that begin, not far apart in time, on a railway platform:

It was five o’clock on a winter’s morning in Syria. Alongside the platform at Aleppo stood the train grandly designated in railway guides as the Taurus Express. It consisted of a kitchen and dining car, a sleeping car and two local coaches.

By the step leading up into the sleeping car stood a young French lieutenant, resplendent in uniform, conversing with a small lean man, muffled up to the ears, of whom nothing was visible but a pink-tipped nose and the two points of an upward curled moustache.

It was freezingly cold, and this job of seeing off a distinguished stranger was not one to be envied, but Lieutenant Dubosc performed his part manfully.

For mystery buffs, no further clues are needed: the sentences open Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express,” still in print after nearly eight decades. Christie’s writing is like that of many others in the field: practical, no-nonsense, bordering on cliché, with a faint didactic hum. The scene is set, a tone is established, and nothing, one feels, will come between us and the story.

Now another train station:

The two young men—they were of the English public official class—sat in the perfectly appointed railway carriage. The leather straps to the windows were of virgin newness; the mirrors beneath the new luggage racks immaculate as if they had reflected very little; the bulging upholstery in its luxuriant, regulated curves was scarlet and yellow in an intricate, minute dragon pattern, the design of a geometrician in Cologne. The compartment smelt faintly, hygienically of admirable varnish; the train ran as smoothly—Tietjens remembered thinking—as British gilt-edged securities.

The second passage introduces Ford Madox Ford’s four-decker novel “Parade’s End.” Ford also has a story to tell, but he’ll take his time about it, unfurling complex sentences in a series of dependent clauses, with an eye toward the unique (“minute dragon pattern”) as opposed to the generalized detail (“pink-tipped nose”). Christie’s language wants us to settle in; Ford’s demands that we pay attention (varnish is admirable, but who knew?), which, of course, puts any serious writer at risk—style may not be the man, but it surely makes us notice him.

The typical genre writer keeps rhetorical flourishes to a minimum, and the typical reader is content to let him. Readers who require more must look either to other kinds of novels or to those genre writers who care deeply about their sentences. Raymond Chandler, for one, professed not to care “a button” for the hardboiled form, yet he wanted to write good hardboiled fiction. To do so, he downplayed plot and concentrated on “experiments in dramatic dialogue . . . what Errol Flynn calls ‘the music,’ the lines he has to speak.”

Still, he knew that certain expectations must be met, since it’s the formulaic nature of genre writing (variations serve to underscore such expectations) that keeps us coming back. The reason that Wittgenstein eagerly awaited his monthly copy of Street & Smith’s Detective Story is the same that prompted Nadezhda Mandelstam to ask visitors to bring her Agatha Christie’s latest. Neither one was after startling revelations about nature or society; they simply wanted the comfort of a familiar voice recounting a story that they hadn’t quite heard before. Call it a vice (Edmund Wilson does), call it an addiction (Auden’s word), a guilty pleasure in book form simply means time off from heavy lifting or heavy reading. Auden, in truth, didn’t do Chandler any favors by admonishing prospective readers that Chandler’s books should be “judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art”—because it’s only as models of escape literature that they work as art.

Everyone ought to get away once in a while—especially if you’re the President. But when Barack Obama bought some books on Martha’s Vineyard last August a writer for the National Review seemed put out that they included a trilogy of sinewy crime novels by Daniel Woodrell: “While there is nothing wrong with that per se, not every presidential reading selection is worth revealing to the public. Bill Clinton, for example, used to love mysteries, but he did not advertise the titles of what he once called ‘my little cheap-thrills outlet.’ ”

Apparently, we’re still judged by the books we read, and perhaps we should be. Preferring Ken Follett’s “On Wings of Eagles” to Henry James’s “Wings of the Dove” is not a negligible bias. Nonetheless, we shouldn’t sell short the likes of Follett, or, for that matter, Ross Thomas (the smoothest of thriller writers), John Grisham, James Lee Burke, Sue Grafton, Janet Evanovich, Robert Crais, or George Pelecanos, all of whom consistently deliver entertaining works in serviceable prose. Such writers have a gift that is as mysterious to nonwriters as plucking melodies out of thin air is to nonmusicians. Plotting, inventing, creating characters, putting words in their mouths and quirks in their personalities—it all seems pretty astonishing to me. The prose may be uneven and the observations about life and society predictable, but, if the story moves, we, almost involuntarily, move with it. And, if we feel a little guilty about getting so swept up, there’s always “The Death of Virgil” to read as penance. ♦

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